The Blue Afternoon

by William Boyd

  “The actress?” I said.

  “No, the woman two along from her.”

  I peered closer. An elegant woman, in her fifties perhaps, still attractive, applauding, a faint ambiguous smile on her face. The focus was sharp, I could make out the paisley motif on her dress but I could not judge whether her smile was one of polite boredom or polite enthusiasm. Between her and the actress was an elderly man with white hair in a dark suit; on her other side a naval officer of some exalted rank; the other figures were blurred. No-one else apart from the actress and the tennis star was identified.

  Carriscant took the page away from me and folded it carefully, slipping it back into its wallet.

  “That is her,” he said simply and with curious authority. “I was never sure, never really sure, that’s why I needed to find Paton. He was the only one who could confirm it.”

  “Confirm what?”

  “That she was—that she is—who I thought she was.”

  “And he did?”

  “Without hesitation. Without a moment’s hesitation.” He let a slow shuddering breath pass from him. “And now I know. You can’t imagine what it’s like, after thirty-three years.”

  “Dr Carriscant, you have to tell me what you’re talking about. There’s no point if I don’t—”

  He held up a hand to stop me and then breathed in and out, a dozen deep breaths as if to invigorate himself, as if he had been asleep for a long time. It was most irritating.

  “All this time,” he began, “I thought she might be dead, you see. Thought I’d never know what happened. But then I found this picture, by some…some miraculous, some devious twist of fate. And now I know she’s alive.”

  “But the picture’s almost ten years old.”

  “But she’s alive. She looks—” Tears bulged at his lids, his voice thickened. “I know she is waiting for me.” He said this with adamantine confidence, and then turned to me.

  “We’ll go and find her.”

  “We? What’re you talking about?”

  “You and me, Kay—dear Kay. We will go to Lisbon and find her.”

  ELEVEN

  It is hard to find a small cemetery in Los Angeles. And I was set on my son being buried somewhere small and private, a place where there would be few passers-by, where there would be fewer incurious glances than in some multi-acre necropolis or the vast landscaped death park that is the norm.

  I found an old, partially rebuilt mission at the north end of the San Fernando Valley where, by dint of a hefty donation to the restoration fund, I was provided with a plot in one corner, shaded by a grove of eucalyptus trees. I go there from time to time, about once a month, trying not to make a ritual out of my visits, in good moods and bad, but inevitably the place has forged its associations (I have no real memory of him, after all) and now it is the rattle of dry leaves, the tomcat smell of eucalyptus, even the filigreed shadow of sun through branches, that conspire to remind me of my dead son.

  I spent some time on the headstone also: what does one inscribe when a life has only spanned sixteen days? “Those whom the Gods love…?” ‘Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher, all is vanity’? In the end I chose white marble, very simple, and had the name and the date inlaid in bronze.

  COLMAN BROCKWAY

  10 April 1930

  26 April 1930

  Over the years since his death the verdigris on the bronze lettering has run and stained the marble beneath, like green tears. Green tears for my blue baby. Coleman Brockway came into the world with a stacked deck against him from day one—he had a hole in his heart.

  TWELVE

  Mrs Luard Turner wore a white fox wrap with her aquamarine suit even though the day was hot and the sky above was a changeless blue. She was heavily made up too, like an actress, I thought, with a thick base of panstick and powder over skin that was beginning to show signs of slippage and slackening. I closed the door of the big closet in the bedroom.

  “You’ll notice the house has many closets,” I said, “and that many of them are twice as large as is normal.”

  “What? Why, yes, I did think—”

  “The idea, you see, is that there should be no clutter. Everything can be stowed away.” I smiled at her, I was starting to hector, I knew, a habit I fall into when I suspect someone is not really paying attention. “I can’t stop people owning possessions, but I can encourage them to keep them out of sight.”

  “Oh, sure,” she smiled back, uncertainly. “I, ah, like to be tidy too.”

  “Everything in this house has been thought through, Mrs Turner. Every proportion is precise. Wherever possible I have built the furniture in—like the kitchen, like that unit of drawers and shelves in the living room—because you simply cannot, in a house of this style, of this, if I may say so, ethos, make a—”

  “I’m sorry? Eeth what?”

  “—you can’t just put in ordinary furniture, your average sofa, armchairs, etcetera.”

  “I can’t?”

  “Where you need new furniture I would ask you—actually, I would beg you—to go to specialist furniture makers. Order items that will suit the house, you’ll never regret it. I can give you half a dozen names of—”

  “Mrs Fischer is very proud of her house,” George Fugal interrupted with a nervous laugh.

  “Oh, sure,” Mrs Turner said, looking around. “Ah, is the bathroom functioning?”

  I showed her where it was.

  “It’s a done deal,” George said. “She’s crazy about the place.”

  “Could have fooled me. Is she all right? She seems sort of distant, not in touch. Is there—”

  “Kay, I have ten per cent in escrow. She’s not fooling around.” He looked nervously over his shoulder and lowered his voice. “Will I be able to hear the noise of the flush? I mean here, in this room?”

  “Probably. Why?”

  “Could we go downstairs? It makes me uncomfortable, you know, when she comes out—I hate that moment.”

  George and I descended the stairs noisily, our feet clattering on the bare boards, so Mrs Turner could flush the toilet without fear of embarrassment.

  “I think you could have made these stairs wider.”

  “George, I don’t advise you on points of law.”

  Mrs Luard Turner duly appeared and was duly satisfied. She forgot to ask but I still gave her a list of names of cabinet makers who could provide her with dining room tables and easy chairs that would not destroy the clean lines of my perfect rooms. It was agreed that the contracts would be signed in Fugal’s offices the next day at 10 a.m.

  I drove west on Sunset and turned up Normandie on to Hollywood. Carriscant was pacing up and down outside the front door of my building. It was five days now since our trip to Santa Fe and I had not seen him in the meantime, all my efforts having been concentrated on ensuring the house was ready for sale. The by now increasingly familiar aggregate of emotions coagulated inside me as I pulled up at the kerb and I saw him hurry over—a tacky mass of surprise, curiosity, fractiousness and fatigue. The trip to Santa Fe had proved too sustained and rich a diet of Salvador Carriscant. For the moment smaller doses were what was required.

  Carriscant followed me into my office, close on my heels, as if he was expecting me to make a run for it; I could sense his impatience and his excitement brewing in the air around us but I refused to be cajoled or hurried, taking my time checking my messages with Mary and spending five minutes with Ivan looking over the preliminary drawings that he had made on a new site we had found in Silver Lake, a few streets north of Micheltoreno.

  Eventually I allowed Carriscant to take a seat in my office while I made a call to Fugal to confirm that all was proceeding normally with the Luard Turner deal—everything was in order. I recradled the phone.

  “Look, you can’t stay long,” I said, “these are my office hours. If you knew how busy—”

  “Kay, I understand. No-one understands better than me. I simply thought you would like to be the first to know.” />
  “What?”

  “What I’ve found out about the photograph.” He removed the soft wallet from his coat pocket. “It’s amazing what information you can mine from a well-equipped public library.”

  “Fire away.”

  Carriscant told me he had discovered more about the tennis match that the photograph featured. It had been part of a series of charity events taking place over three days—bicycle races, boxing bouts, a raffle with cash prizes—co-sponsored by the US legation, the Portuguese Red Cross and an Anglo-Portuguese charity welfare group called the Knights of 1147, commemorating the year, Carriscant informed me with an annoying pedagogical air, when English crusaders helped capture Lisbon from the Moors. The festival had occurred between 20 and 23 May to celebrate the Knights’ golden jubilee and the visit of the US Navy’s light cruiser Olympia and a British destroyer flotilla to Lisbon. The tennis match had been the highlight of the three days’ entertainments, an exhibition game between Riverain and Carlos Pelicet. “Riverain won 6-2, 6-4,” Carriscant informed me. “Apparently it was a closer match than the score suggests.” What was interesting, he went on, was that the cup had been named after the wife of the US envoy—the Lillian Aishlie cup.

  “And what was even more interesting,” Carriscant said, leaning forward, placing both hands on my desk, “is that the envoy’s wife did not present the trophy.”

  I assumed Carriscant would inform me why this was ‘even more interesting’ in his own good time.

  “I know,” I said dutifully, “that actress—what’s her name—did.”

  “Exactly. Q.E.D.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “The envoy’s wife couldn’t have been there.”

  “Possibly. So what?”

  “So that means the other people on the dais were more than likely US legation staff.”

  Finally I began to see the meandering line his reasoning was taking. “So,” I said, slowly, “no ambassador’s wife for the presentation of her own trophy—”

  “Call in a cinema actress. But someone has to be there from the legation.”

  “Why not the Red Cross or the Knights of diddly-squat?”

  “Because this was the USA’s event.” He removed his precious photograph from its wallet and spread it out on my blotter. The actress, the white-haired man in the dark suit, Carriscant’s lady with her enigmatic smile, the naval officer.

  “The guest of honour,” Carriscant said, his forefinger on Carmencita Barrera (the nail was rimmed with dirt, I noticed), it jumped the next two faces down the line, “the naval officer,” back for the white-haired man, “the envoy and,” he paused, “the envoy’s guest, or the naval officer’s wife.”

  I could see that this last appellation affected him. “It sounds plausible,” I said, “but you can’t know for sure.” I turned the magazine page round to face him. “All these people are on the gorgeous Carmencita’s left. The really important people could be on the right.”

  “No, absolutely not. Press photographers always make sure the dignitaries are in the shot.”

  I could see he was in no mood to quibble. He was convinced with all the unreasoning certainty of a zealot, and he was not going to be shifted.

  “So, you’re saying—” I began.

  “I’m saying that this woman…” there was now a distinct tremble in his voice, an emotional vibrato. “This woman was the friend or wife of a US embassy official in Lisbon in 1927.” He reclined in his chair, his face set in the curious clenched half-grimace of someone fighting to hold tears back. He folded his arms tightly across his chest, embracing himself.

  “This is where the trail starts,” he, said, his voice husky with triumph. “This is where it must begin.”

  “Well, good luck to you.”

  He looked at me blankly, emptily for an instant, as if I had suddenly spoken in a foreign language.

  “No, Kay, we begin. Us, you and me. I can’t go without you.”

  “I told you the last time, I’m not going anywhere. I have a house to design. I have a life to live here, for God’s sake.”

  “It would only be for six weeks, two months.”

  I laughed: more a gasp of incredulity than a laugh, actually.

  “Dr Carriscant, this is your…your obsession, not mine. I barely know you. I can’t simply—”

  “I can’t afford to go to Lisbon,” he said petulantly, accusingly, as if it were my fault. “I have no money.”

  “Neither of us has money.”

  “You’ve just sold your house.”

  “Yes, my house. To build another one. We work on a shoestring here, look around you.”

  He lowered his head to stare at his hands which were held in his lap, loose fists. His shoulders hunched and subsided a few times, as if he were relieving an ache, and when he looked up at me again shameless tears were flowing from his eyes.

  “Kay, I’m asking you as my daughter—”

  “Stop that, right now—”

  “—as your father. Come with me, help me.”

  “You are not my father,” I shouted at him. “Hugh Paget was my father. How dare you—”

  “No, I am, I am, Kay!” he shouted back. “I am!”

  The fervent confidence with which he made this claim silenced and unsettled me. I realised that in my association with Salvador Carriscant, the hours I had spent in his company, our two-day trip to Santa Fe, I had tacitly set aside my doubts and had complacently—perhaps voluntarily—allowed the assumption he had made to lie there between us, like a gift proffered, but not yet accepted. Nor yet rejected. Now was the time for that act to occur.

  “If you are my father,” I sad reasonably, under control, “then who is my mother?”

  “Why, your mother, of course. Annaliese.”

  “She is alive and well and living in Long Beach, California, if you want to go visit.”

  He looked sad and shook his head, wordlessly, then sniffed and wiped the drying tears from his cheeks. Not for the first time I asked myself if he was an innocent fool or simply a very bad actor.

  “She would never see me,” he said. “She would never acknowledge me.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because of what I did to her.”

  “How long were you married?”

  “Five years.”

  I stopped myself from asking any more questions even though dozens of fresh ones were lining up clamouring in my head. What was the date of the marriage? How old was I when it ended?…The problem was that all my questions presupposed the veracity of his version of events—and I saw that this was how Salvador Carriscant drew you in, enmeshed and enmired you. I was not going to play his dangerous games any longer.

  “I’m sorry, Dr Carriscant,” I said abruptly. “I can’t help you on this, no.”

  He stared at me balefully, sullenly, his eyes full of a new dislike and resentment. And then, all at once, the mood passed and his face brightened. He exhaled and let his shoulders slump and smiled weakly.

  “Oh, well,” he said almost light-heartedly, “what can I do? I hope you won’t object if I try to change your mind—from time to time.”

  “You can try,” I said, “but it won’t work.”

  THIRTEEN

  Philip’s thigh was still warm against mine. Too warm. I moved further away from him, very slowly, shifting myself along the mattress until I felt the moistness on my flank begin to cool. No portion of my body touched his, none of the calorific glow emanating from him warmed me: if it had not been for the surprisingly loud sound of his breathing I might have been alone in my bed. I spread my fingers and the tips touched a damp patch on the mattress—his semen, I supposed, and immediately my mind turned to the banal routines of housekeeping, of needing now to change my sheets even though they had been on the bed barely a day…

  It had been a mistake to invite him to stay a night with me. We had made love, which of course was what I had wanted, a sudden and simple need for effective sex of some prolonged duration—so I could e
xperience its visceral uncomplicated joys with none of its complicated personal preambles and aftermath. Philip was the only person who could furnish me with that, and he had, with, for him, an extra dimension of delight (it had been over a year since the last time), but he had fallen asleep, literally a minute after it was over, it seemed, his head heavy in the hollow between my shoulder and my breast, his legs against mine, a palm flat on my thigh. It had taken me ten minutes of small patient manoeuvrings to free myself from the various contacts with his body and I lay now, still and untouched in my small area of coolness, wishing he was home and trying not to feel cross with myself.

  I met Philip in 1928 on the campus at UCLA where I was taking evening extension classes in German. Philip was studying German too, with a vaguely conceived view of going to work in Germany, in the film business there. I was keen to better understand and translate some of Kranewitter’s Metall articles whereas Philip only sought a basic conversational fluency. It had been one of his many passing fads; it lasted three weeks in this case but the enthusiasm survived long enough for us to note each other, find each other attractive and contrive oh so casually to meet.

  We dined, we dated. I was much slimmer in those days and, I’m sure, much jollier company. Without much ado we began an affair. Some weeks later when Philip was between apartments he came to sleep over at my little house in Westwood village and discreetly stayed on. We married soon after that in the spring of 1929. Coleman was born a year later—blue and damned—and when he died all happiness left us. We divorced in Mexico that summer and it took us an awkward year to become friends again. I knew that Philip was still attracted to me but I had changed and could now see the conspicuous weaknesses in him, however much he amused me. It was a long time before I relented and we slept together. Tonight had been the fourth time. These occasions were becoming progressively less enjoyable.